


time is hard to kill (since i met you)

by bewitchings



Category: Marvel, The Avengers - All Fandoms
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, F/M, M/M, Multi, Polyamory
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2012-08-03
Updated: 2012-09-04
Packaged: 2017-11-11 08:35:05
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 3
Words: 2,643
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/476640
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bewitchings/pseuds/bewitchings
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>they're not bad people, it's just that good people don't exist.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. they meet

 

i.

 

She's digging a bullet out of her arm with tweezers and a fifth of vodka in her stomach. On the rim of the bottle Natasha can taste the copper taste of blood.

 

Her stomach stirs and her eyes close. _It's my last job_ , she swears to herself, _I’m done after this. I'll find a tiny cottage and a nice partner._ She smirks and sighs because people like Natasha never find 'nice' partners.

 

They find addicts and lowlifes and sleeper assassins. They find back alley drug pushers and hoodlums with hearts of gold and empty pockets.

 

So she stitches herself back up with black thread, wincing only out of habit and tries not to sigh at the sound of her joints creaking.

 

Natasha is only twenty-six but she's already broken both her knees, one leg, a wrist, an arm and the worst of all, her collarbone. Most of them occurred when she was younger, swinging out of buildings and tumbling from moving cars because it was fun then.

 

She had a purpose; her country, her motherland and best of all vengeance on the tip of her tongue. The perfect little assassin.

 

After another swig of the vodka bottle with her good arm and looks at the CCTV on the monitor beside her; the two marks enter the Chinese restaurant below her room right on time, she’s been watching them the whole week. They drink, they laugh and they leave.  She bought out the tiny studio flat above two weeks ago when she first got the call. The security guy found her fake passports a few hours ago and planted two bullets in her arm.

 

She gave him a bite that would last a long time but not too much to kill him before tying him up and throwing him into her closet. After being mercilessly hunted down by various governments she knows 'collateral damage' doesn't translate well in any language.

 

ii.

 

Out of the corner of her eye she sees the first mark; he's skinny with a bad peroxide dye job and a prosthetic scar on his cheek.

 

The man beside him nods and leers at Natasha at the other side of the bar, he’s homely and his muscular figure grotesque but she musters a smirk and looks away. The other looks hard, or has modelled himself to look it at least, but she knows to take the larger one down first.

 

So she walks over to him and shoots twice into his skull, it's messy, her face is drenched with the red of his blood and the pink and grey bits of his brain. Natasha is used to the stench, the sound, even the taste as some blood dribbles into her mouth. As always she berates herself for not wearing a mask but knows in the pit of her stomach she won't ever wear one (it's impractical).

 

The mark doesn't look surprised at all by her being there, or that parts of his friend’s head are laying in his lap. He grins warmly and places his hands together.

 

"So they finally found me?" His voice is calm amongst the chaos around them, people race to the restaurant doors, screaming and cursing.

 

Natasha only nods and puts the gun to his forehead. It's worse like this, she thinks, when you have to put your hands on their shoulders and feel them shudder so they don’t struggle, the heat of their last breath.

 

Her finger hugs the trigger, until he looks at her and grins wider, unfazed.

 

"Don't you remember me volchitsa?" He asks, quietly now that everyone's fled.

 

She's surprised but hides it under her stoic gaze, her lips pursing. "Don't you know pretending to be a dead man is punishable by death?"

 

He throws his head back and laughs, it's worn and desperate and for a moment she thinks that maybe it could be him.

 

"Natalia, I'm already dead, I've died two times in my life," Natasha slaps him. "Your bite still stings I see."

 

She saw Bucky die, saw his heartbroken friend pull him out from the ashes and rubble.

 

She thinks of him now, Steve, she wonders if he knows Bucky's back. She wonders if he's always known, even from the first time.

 

"I thought you'd be better with disguises."  She says and Bucky stops smiling and runs his fingers through his hair.

 

"You didn't recognise me? I'd say I was successful."

 

Natasha knocks him out with the handle of her gun as sirens pour into the street. Her arm still aches but she throws him over her shoulder with a groan and slips through the back door.


	2. they burn

i.

 

"I don't go looking for dead men, Mr. Barnes."

 

Bucky comes to on the floor of Natasha’s motel room and Natasha finds pleasure in how horrendous he looks, the fake scar is peeling and he hasn't shaved in what looks like five months.

 

"That's why I did it," he says, voice raspy. She glares at him and hands him a cracked mug of coffee, he smiles. "Hey can I crash here?"

 

"I should have smothered you in your sleep." She says and pulls the pillow from under his head, trying not to laugh as he curses at the spilt coffee on his chest.

 

ii.

 

Bucky spends the next morning throwing up in Natasha's tiny basin in the mouldy motel bathroom and hallucinating.

 

Sometimes he thinks she's Steve and launches vitriol attacks with slurred words and curses in Russian, French and English.

 

Natasha just pats his damp head gingerly and wishes he would go away.

 

iii.

 

"Steve Rogers?"

 

"Yeah, who's asking?" He sounds tired, Natasha grips the phone, knuckles turning white.

 

"The Black Widow," She says, holds her breath.

 

"Oh yeah?" Steve laughs. "Which one?"

 

iiv.

 

Natasha Romanova stopped existing in 1989; Natalia Alianovna fell off the face of the earth and landed on her hands.

 

Bucky stopped existing a little before her, a little after the war, he came back to fight another one, a silent one, but fell once more.

 

And Steve, wonderful, beautiful, cruel Steve barely ever existed. He too, like the rest of them, ceased to exist after the war. (Heroes rarely survive but none of them are heroes, they've saved the world but they've burnt a hole in the middle too).

 

Steve turns up at Natasha's current home, a shabby yet cosy motel room in the outskirts of Manhattan, and he's smiling.

 

"This place isn't really your style Nat," he says leaning into the doorway, his fingernails worry at the peeling wallpaper. Flakes of white and green dust the wooden floorboards.

 

"Oh yeah?" Natasha steps back into the room to let him in. "What do you know about my style, Rogers?"

 

He spots Bucky curled up on her timeworn sofa sleeping soundlessly, skin sallow and covered with a sheeny film of sweat.

 

She tries to gorge his reaction but Steve only nods his head and turns back to her.

 

"Enough to know that this isn't it." He says and Natasha rolls her eyes and crosses her arms to keep herself from hugging him.

 

Later that night, Natasha is making microwavable spaghetti bolognese and Steve slips in behind her, a ghosting breath on the back of her neck, but she's already got a knife to his throat as he asks, "What's wrong with him?"

 

He doesn't seem disturbed by the blade at his pale of his throat; he almost looks as if he was expecting it.

 

She doesn't know whether he means why Bucky is sick or why he keeps coming back.

 

Either way she drops the knife to the ground and mumbles, "I don't know."


	3. they run

i.

 

It's late October and they've spent two weeks inside the motel room eating bad food, watching television and walking on glass shards around each other. 

 

Of course, they find them, the others, the ones who want Bucky dead and the ones who want Natasha dead for not killing him.

 

The company bring freelance thugs and it's a bloody fight with only Steve and Natasha fighting as Bucky falls in and out of consciousness, but it does the job.

 

They're running down damp barely lit back streets, too wary to read the names, laughing with adrenaline and it's just like before for Natasha. Bucky's hobbling beside her in a dazed stupor and Steve has his arm around him, grinning at Natasha with a mouth full of blood.

 

They turn into a dark alley and huddle under a flickering street lamp. Steve’s panting heavily with bloody grazed hands on scraped knees and Natasha’s leaning on the brick wall, only slightly aware of her spots on her limbs beginning to ache.

She’s thinking that she’ll bruise badly but nothing’s broken, that they’ll find somewhere to go. She hears the clattering of teeth, Bucky’s, and pulls her filthy leather jacket over his shoulders, ignoring Steve’s snort.

 

Bucky looks more alive than he's looked in days, his skin no longer is the same shade as their grimy motel walls yet he stands ever so still, as if he’s afraid if he moves he’ll fall over. Without the harsh motel light and his eyes closed, Natasha thinks he looks better, almost as handsome as before.

 

She watches his chest rise and fall in Steve's Captain America memorabilia shirt. Steve either gave it to for a cruel display of irony or something to make Bucky remember. (Natasha reckons it’s the latter, Steve's weakness has always been his sentimentality.)

Steve pulls her away and rakes his fingers through her hair, her ears are buzzing but she thinks he's saying something like _"I've always loved your hair red"_ and it sounds a little too much like something else.

 

Either way Natasha does something stupid like crashing her lips against his, ears still buzzing, both their bruises stinging as she crushes her body against his. He's all muscle but she swear she feels his bones first.

 

She tastes blood and smiles into the kiss, his skeleton hugging her close. Steve's the first to pull away, his eyes go straight to Bucky but Bucky's eyes are still closed, a sloping grin fixed on his face.

 

Natasha steps away, she doesn't feel hurt, the euphoria from the fight still courses through her veins. But she still walks over to Bucky and taps him on the face a little harsher than she should. He opens his eyes, from the glow of the fluttering streetlamp, she sees the purple circles around his bloodshot eyes.

 

"Are we dead?" He asks quietly, almost childlike, and Natasha has to remind herself that she's younger than him.

 

"No Bucky, not yet," she says and tries to smile although she's so tired, the adrenaline and euphoria have washed away and all she remembers is Steve's skeleton.

 

Then it's just Bucky's hand in hers as they're walking back down the winding streets whilst Steve leads the way in tentative silence.

 

How funny, she thinks as Bucky rubs his thumb across her palm, these hands, our hands, were taught to kill.

 

ii.

 

On their second day on the run Steve and Natasha empty out their bank accounts.

 

Bucky slips in and out of consciousness in a new motel room, he's stopped hallucinating but he still looks like a corpse, blinking only in short bursts as if his body is making up for the blinks he missed.

 

"What did they do to him this time?" Steve asks her when they're heating chicken soup in yet another grimy motel microwave. There's an accusation hanging from his words, by _‘they’_ he means _‘you’ Natasha_ , _'your'_ people but she lets it go.

 

"We don't know if it was them who brought him back this time, he seemed fine when I first saw him." She tells him.

 

Steve pours the soup into a plastic bowl, looks at her in eye and says, "Then who? Why was he with that guy you killed anyway?"

 

Another accusation. She knows he detests murder, ever the golden boy, but golden or not he was a soldier, they all were soldiers. They've got more blood on their hands than most people. He should understand.

 

"You think I haven't asked him that, Steve? I can't talk to him for five minutes without him either passing out or trying to kill me because he thinks I'm you!"

 

Natasha curses the words the moment she says them. She doesn't want to take them back, it's the truth after all but she sees the anger in Steve's eyes before he turns away and she remembers that he's still Captain America, he could still crush her throat with one hand (but he _wouldn't_ , she thinks, hopes).

 

Steve is silent, he gives the bowl to Bucky, now awake, watching them both wearily. "It wasn't the Soviets," Bucky says and it's the first coherent thing he's said in days.

 

"Then who?" Steve rubs at his temples. "What were you doing with that guy?"

 

"I was looking for you." Bucky says, brushing his knuckles against Steve's bruised cheek.

 

Steve lets him stroke his face until he passes out again. And even then he crosses his legs, turns towards the television and waits for Bucky to wake up.

 

iii.

 

After two more uneventful nights in the motel, Steve calls on some favours and they find a hideout out in Montauk.

 

It's an unremarkable little cottage by the water yet even from the outside Natasha knows it's far better than the decaying motels she's stayed in for the past few weeks.

 

There's two single beds and one bedroom Steve offers to stay with Bucky and Natasha thinks, no you're not getting away that easily, and suggests they push the beds together. Nobody protests. The mattresses are soft, the quilts are even softer and Steve breaks into jovial screams of glee at the sight of the large oven.

 

"What a shame," Natasha says and flicks his ear. "I was getting used to the taste of plastic noodles and soup."

 

iv.

 

Bucky's getting better, he can walk with ease and talk coherently and he no longer looks like he's dying. Steve thinks it’s the fresh air but Natasha knows there's something going on, she feels it crawling under her skin. No matter how much she itches, the feeling doesn't disappear.

 

She confronts Bucky as he comes out of the shower, they've switched off all the lights save a few lamps and she can just about make out his face. He's grinning, wolfish, and she doesn't like it. She's the wolf after all. Her mouth is posed to ask a question which withers on her tongue as his fingers cup around her mouth. He curls his other arm around the small of her back and she relaxed into his chest. His body feels exactly like it used to, except she no longer feels the cold kiss of the metal of his arm, they fixed that. His fingers explore the skin on her hips and slowly move lower brushing lightly across the hem of her skirt and the inside of her thigh.

 

He doesn't kiss like Steve, she thinks as his fingers crawl further up her leg, knuckles brushing against black silk. Then she thinks of Steve and sighs slightly as he drags his mouth onto her jaw, she thinks of Steve sitting in the other room, legs tucked up into his chest, head on his knees. Bucky kisses her once, twice then pulls back, says, "You wanted to say something?"

 

There's something in his smile, something which makes her shake her head and pull his hands back onto her thighs. Something that makes her forget that she's stuck in Montauk with two solemn men who keep kissing her in the dark.

 

But she kisses back, her turn to be the wolf, her turn to keep secrets, she's burned through a lot of partners, but only few burnt her and none quite like the Winter Soldier. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> really sorry about the wait, annoying uni stuff to do! thanks for the kudos' and comments though, they are much appreciated.


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